R.I.P. 2020
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@Bones said in R.I.P. 2020:
@sparky think he played one pre-season game or something.
The Warriors got ahead of this
We thought he was good enough, but he wasn't.
First class c*nt
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I know on TSF we should attempt to be far more constructive in our posts and say more than just “what an utter vile evil piece of shit”, but some days when the story gets even worse it just seems right ...
I’ve never liked the conceptual idea of a hell of any sort for any one... yet there are moments when you very briefly entertain the idea of some sort of further punishment for someone who puts his wife and three little kids through this in their last moments.
Mental health alone would be doing it to himself. Dragging others into his funeral pyre suggests much more about this character....
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12310054
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It's a pity he succumbed to his injuries.
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@antipodean said in R.I.P. 2020:
It's a pity he succumbed to his injuries.
Death was too good for him
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Jeanette Fitzsimons off to greener pastures...
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@Billy-Tell said in R.I.P. 2020:
Jeanette Fitzsimons off to greener pastures...
Sad news. She always came across as a good person.
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Matthew Watkins, former Wales, Dragons, Scarlets and Gloucester has died of Cancer aged 41.
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@sparky said in R.I.P. 2020:
Matthew Watkins, former Wales, Dragons, Scarlets and Gloucester has died of Cancer aged 41.
Very sad
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Max von Sydow
90 years of age
Max von Sydow, star of The Exorcist and The Seventh Seal, dies aged 90
The veteran actor, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, as well as roles in Star Wars and Hannah and Her Sisters, has died
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@MiketheSnow said in R.I.P. 2020:
Max von Sydow
90 years of age
Max von Sydow, star of The Exorcist and The Seventh Seal, dies aged 90
The veteran actor, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, as well as roles in Star Wars and Hannah and Her Sisters, has died
He had a good run
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I totally missed that Freeman Dyson died on February 28th. He was a hugely influential and imaginative physicist. From The Times register:
One talent Freeman Dyson possessed in abundance was dreaming. In the 1950s he imagined cruising around the solar system “exploring the planets and moons, just as Charles Darwin cruised with the good ship Beagle around the Earth exploring the continents and islands”. His “fuel” for propulsion? Two thousand nuclear bombs.
“The basic idea is absurdly simple,” he said. “One is amazed that nobody thought of it before.”
This was no mere fantasy. It was part of the Orion project, funded by US taxpayers through the Department of Defence. Dyson worked on the project for six years before it was killed off by the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning the use of nuclear weapons in space.
His was one of the most brilliant and original minds of the 20th century. To call him a theoretical physicist and mathematician hardly begins to describe him. But, British-born, he died largely unrecognised by this country beyond a fellowship of the Royal Society conferred when he was 28. He was said to be the best physicist never to receive a Nobel prize, and arguably should have shared the 1965 physics prize with Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.
They won it for their work in quantum electrodynamics, Dyson’s prime discipline. On a Greyhound bus ride in 1949 Dyson realised that the rival formulations of quantum electrodynamics, one by Feynman and the other by Schwinger and Tomonaga, were identical and could be synthesised.
“I think it’s almost true without exception if you want to win a Nobel prize,” Dyson said, “you should have a long attention span, get hold of some deep and important problem and stay with it for ten years. That wasn’t my style.”
His style developed to introduce a powerful moral dimension in books about nuclear fission, space travel and the prospects of encountering civilisations in other parts of the universe. Aside from solid-state physics, nuclear engineering and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, he proposed using mirrors to improve ground-based telescopes.
Short, thin and humorous, Dyson could seem like a character who had walked straight out of the pages of a Tolkien novel and there was about him an air of moral superiority. In the 1960s, having become a US citizen, he changed his mind about atomic testing. He had been in favour of it until, to his horror, he saw the number of atomic explosions increasing exponentially.
Dyson questioned conventional wisdom about climate change, arguing that climatologists were unable to calculate how much global warming is caused by human activity and how much is due to natural variability. Even more controversially, he believed that global warming could make the Sahara desert wet enough to bloom.
In a 2009 profile of Dyson in The New York Times Magazine, his colleague Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, said: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, he will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Dyson had strong theories about combatting overcrowding on Earth. His hypothetical Dyson Spheres were artificial planets that could orbit the sun, creating habitats with inexhaustible sunlight energy. Dyson Trees were artificial plants that could create a breathable atmosphere on comets.
Freeman John Dyson was born in 1923 in Crowthorne, Berkshire. His father was Sir George Dyson, a musician, composer and conductor who became director of the Royal Academy of Music, and his mother, Mildred Lucy (née Atkey) was a lawyer who became a social worker.
Shortly after Freeman was born, his father was appointed master of music at Winchester College in Hampshire. Freeman spent his early years there, attending a day school and then boarding at Twyford College near by.
The top scholar in his Winchester intake, and excelling at mathematics, at 14 he taught himself Russian to read an introduction to the theory of numbers by Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov. A year later he taught himself calculus.
“Things were really black at that time,” Dyson said. “My childhood was dominated by this disaster of the First World War and we saw the Second World War coming, and it was almost certainly going to be worse. And of course there was this economic depression and England was tremendously polluted. Every evening, my shirt collar was black.” He escaped school bullies by immersing himself in science fiction by HG Wells, Jules Verne and Olaf Stapledon, who gave him the idea for Dyson Spheres. In 1941, Dyson was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Called up in 1943, with considerable pacifist misgivings he became an RAF Bomber Command analyst, calculating ways to improve mission efficiency. He proved that experienced bomber crews had no better chance of surviving than inexperienced ones, and having tail gunners merely increased casualties. But as his analyses led to bombers destroying whole cities, he wondered “how it happened that I let myself become involved in this crazy game of murder”. Dyson suffered terrible guilt. “After the war, I read of the trials of men who had sat in their offices calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me,” he said. “The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, and I went free.”
He graduated in theoretical mathematics from Cambridge in 1945 and promptly became a fellow of Trinity. In 1947, he moved to America on a fellowship to Cornell University, moving back to Britain to Birmingham University two years later. In 1951, despite his lack of a PhD, he was appointed a professor of physics at Cornell, then in 1953 he became a professor at the institute for advanced study at Princeton.
In 1950 Dyson married Verena Huber, a Swiss mathematician he met at the institute for advanced study. When she left him for another man in 1958 he married their au pair, Imme Jung. The first marriage produced two children: George, a scientific historian, and Esther, an investor involved in Wellville, a non-profit health project. Dyson and Imme had four daughters. Dorothy is a veterinary surgeon; Mia, a nurse and chaplain, breeds labradors; Emily is a cardiologist and Rebecca is a radiologist. Verena died in 2016. He is survived by Imme, the six children and 16 grandchildren.
“We had a very normal family life,” said Esther who, like George, remained with Dyson after the divorce. “Dad was always home for dinner. In the winter he would take our sledge to work at Princeton and we would come and pick it up after school and go sledging or ice skating with him.”
He sometimes found practicalities challenging, like operating a drinks vending machine. “You could tell that the world was a beautiful place through his eyes,” Mia said. “Understanding all the formulas and the natural laws and all the mysteries he had plumbed through the study of physics, it only grew more and more beautiful, the more he understood.”
Dyson was a prolific author. He published many articles in scientific journals and many books including Disturbing the Universe (1979), Origins of Life (1985), and A Many-Coloured Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2007).
“In some ways,” Dyson said, “my lifetime has been amazingly quiet and stable. My mother lived through much bigger changes. She started her life riding around in a pony cart and finished up flying in jet planes. I haven’t had any changes as big as that.”
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@canefan said in R.I.P. 2020:
@MiketheSnow said in R.I.P. 2020:
Max von Sydow
90 years of age
Max von Sydow, star of The Exorcist and The Seventh Seal, dies aged 90
The veteran actor, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, as well as roles in Star Wars and Hannah and Her Sisters, has died
He had a good run
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Michel Roux
Turned British culinary scene around
Michel Roux OBE: A Lasting Legacy
The inimitable, legendary chef Michel Roux passed away peacefully on 11 March at home, surrounded by family. We take a look at the unstoppable trajectory of this hugely influential chef, and how he changed French cookery – and the British food scene as a whole – forever.
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Country Music Icon Kenny Rogers Dies at 81
Country Music Icon Kenny Rogers Dies at 81
Kenny Rogers has died at the age of 81 peacefully at home from natural causes under the care of hospice and surrounded by his family.
